Service to launch just weeks before monsoon hits, complete with rain and wind a-plenty Sri Lanka has signed up for broadband services delivered by Google's “Project Loon” broadband balloons.
The Indian ocean nation's minister for foreign affairs, telecommunications and IT Mangala Samaraweera this week took to the stage …

Fujitsu has opened a new data centre location in Western Singapore to feed the appetite for cloud services in Asia.
Operators have flicked the power switch already and cloud services are available as of now.
As distinct divisions, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Asia now operate three data centres in Singapore. The Fujitsu Group already …

The former head of Apple Retail has found a new job, selling handbags and scarves at the head of Monsoon's Accessorize chain.
John Browett only lasted seven months at Cupertino, before Tim Cook edged him out in a reshuffle in September that also saw the end of Apple's software chief Scott Forstall.
Browett is credited with …

High street fashion chain Monsoon is closing its e-commerce arm, saying that it could not justify the £400,000 annual running costs after failing to reach online sales targets.
The company said that it needed to sell £800,000 worth of clobber per year to keep the site viable. At a press briefing the company acknowledged it was …

Obit
Christopher Malcolm, the actor who played Rebel space pilot Zev Senesca - callsign Rogue Two - in The Empire Strikes Back, and also portrayed Rocky Horror Show character Brad Majors and Saffy's gay dad in various episodes of Brit telly hit Absolutely Fabulous, has died aged 67.
Rogue Two in the skies above Hoth.
His daughter …

Apple has drafted in the CEO of high-end Brit faux tartan fashion label Burberry to head up its global retail and online sales biz – a newly created position.
It will be a different type of collection that US national Angela Ahrendts handles when she starts at Apple next spring - as senior veep and a member of Apple's executive …

Product Round-Up
If you’ve been promising yourself a new laptop holdall for ages, why not use this Bank Holiday weekend to get yourself, as the saying goes, a brand new bag? We’ll be looking bags for women tomorrow, so everyone can get kitted out with something chic, but first the swanky stuff for men.
It’s not all about eye candy, though, as …

Seasonal rain in India has left some of the biggest names in IT stranded today.
Problems at Hewlett Packard, which outsourced its UK support to India last year, were reported by several readers.
One HP channel partner said that it had been impossible to assign an engineer to fix a customer's problem, because the call is logged …

Public relations professionals, often thought generally to lie on a spectrum somewhere between Edina Monsoon (Ab Fab) and Malcolm Tucker (The Thick Of It) are actually "fervent about serving the public interest", and typically place their duty to the public above any loyalty to their employers.
We learn this from a press release …

The production of hard disk drives is nearing full capacity after flooding last year in Thailand sent shockwaves through the supply chain, with output set to reach around 80 per cent of pre-flood levels.
A Digitimes report, citing industry sources, claimed that production would increase to somewhere between 140 and 145 million …

To the west of the Philippines' capital, Manila, lies Laguna De Bay, a colossal freshwater lake that has just become the site of what can loosely be called maritime services startups.
The new businesses sprung up weeks ago after the annual monsoon hit the Philippines harder than usual. The lake filled, then spilled into …

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed the first US infringement case to defend the General Public License (GPL) version 2. The case has been brought against Monsoon Multimedia, a specialist in video viewing and capturing devices, which has offices in Silicon Valley and in New Delhi.
SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher …

A GNU General Public License (GPL) test case in the US looks dead in the water after a start-up promised to abide by the GPLv2 rather than duke it out in court with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
The SFLC last week filed suit against Monsoon Multimedia, alleging the Silicon Valley start-up had breached GPLv2. It said …

US retail giant Best Buy and 13 other consumer electronics firms have been named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed yesterday in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
The pro-free and open source software law firm said it had brought the complaint on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the " …

After a false alarm last month, the first lawsuit to test the GPL in the US has actually settled.
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced yesterday that it has reached an agreement with Monsoon Multimedia to end the SFLC's copyright infringement suit against the company.
The lawsuit accused Monsoon of violating GPL …

Glacier and climate boffins have issued a stinging poohpooh to recent alarmist pronouncements on climate-change-driven glacier melt - in particular from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“In the last few years numbers have been named that do not pass a closer examination,“ says glaciologist and …

A top boffin has warned that Blighty may be headed into a "monsoon" period, possibly a decade or more in duration, in which we can expect much more flooding than has been the norm for the past generation or so. Interestingly, Professor Stuart Lane doesn't ascribe his predicted watery onslaught to climate change. He says the UK …

The Software Freedom Law Center is suing Verizon for breaching the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Verizon uses a network utility called busybox in a router it has distributed to its broadband customers since 1999. The program is used to administer the router, which is made by ActionTec. However, Busybox is GPL software …

Review
The 1960s: the decade of peace, love and rock'n'roll. The decade of LSD and flower power, colour television and manned space exploration.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 'Knife to meet you; to meet you, knife'
Only that's not how Captain Alex Mason remembers them. Under interrogation and drugged up to his eyeballs with sodium …

Product Round-up
With Beyonce's bouncy appearance at Glastonbury just days away, the festival season is well and truly underway and unless you sell wellies, you're probably praying for sunny skies. It can't hurt to be prepared for the worst, though.
So as you don those prosthetic horse-heads and gallop off for another weekend of hedonism, we …

BT is buying the UK operations of NSB Retail for £17m cash. The acquisition extends BT's move into the IT services sector, and takes NSB closer to becoming a pure-play software company.
NSB will continue to develop and own its software, while BT will become its exclusive distributor in the UK and Ireland. BT will also have non- …

Farnborough
Former British Army pilots, drawing on military experience carrying out covert surveillance with secret special-forces units, have decided to revive the autogyro - a long-lost aircraft design of the 1930s, probably most famous for its use in the James Bond movies.
The Little Nellie autogyro as used by James Bond, with designer …

SEK2006
The opening of the 20th SEK conference in Seoul, South Korea, was slightly upstaged by the early arrival of the monsoon season - well, that and the imminent missile tests in North Korea. But at least the rain should keep the rocket on its launch pad.
Damp delegates gathered for the opening ceremony of Korea's flagship …

An international team of scientists has presented its list of those regions of the planet most at risk from global warming, which are in danger of "sudden and catastrophic collapse" should they pass "tipping point" thresholds beyond which they will never recover.
The researchers, comprising experts from the Potsdam Institute for …

People are a contrary bunch. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the recent fashion for dismissing global warming as a load of hot air. Indeed, it has become de rigueur to attribute recent increases in global temperatures to something other than human industrial activity and the consequent emission of various greenhouse …

Peter Smith is counting down to the white-knuckle day of his life. On May 25 next year, the Phoenix Mars lander is due to touch down on the Mars surface. If all goes well, over the following 24 to 48 hours the lander's solar panels will extend and the lander will start the science experiments it's there to conduct. As the …

What could be stranger than one Linux business suing another Linux business for devaluing UNIX™?
The SCO Group (formerly Caldera) has filed suit against IBM for investing in Linux and giving away proprietary technology in the operating system. IBM has a proprietary UNIX&trade - AIX™ - but has invested heavily in Linux, and with …

16 February 2000 Hardware Round-up is back after a couple of days leave of absence: sometimes there just ain't enough Reg staffers to go around. Anyway, here goes for a disktastic day in Hardware Review Land. First up is Storage Review, which takes takes time out to spin the platter with the Quantum Atlas V. This represents a " …